Author: NY TIMES

“People want to sit around with the family and watch football,” Roger Goodell, the National Football League commissioner, said Thursday night before the 2024 N.F.L. draft. It is also increasingly the case that people want to sit around, alone or in groups, watching phenomenal athletes and physical specimens doing nothing more physically taxing than sauntering down a red carpet.And, while the N.F.L. has a long way to go before it can stage a real challenge to the style dominance of N.B.A. tunnel-walk kings like Jerami Grant, Jarred Vanderbilt or Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, it was clear that this year’s football draft prospects…

An effort to give Trump more say on rates This week, investors had planned to examine the latest inflation data, due out at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Friday, for clues about when the Fed would start cutting interest rates. But they now have something potentially bigger to digest.The Wall Street Journal reports that allies of Donald Trump are devising ways of watering down the central bank’s independence if he is re-elected president.If true, that change would represent the biggest shake-up in U.S. monetary policy in decades. But it also raises questions about whether such a plan is possible — or…

In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Churros have never tasted more bitter than in this scene from “Challengers.”In this sequence, which takes place at Stanford, the character Art (Mike Faist), who is attending the university, reconnects with his dear friend Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who has left education to become a tennis pro. Not present in the scene, yet hanging…

A baby who was born premature after her mother was killed in an Israeli strike died on Thursday, a relative said, less than a week after news of her birth brought a glimmer of hope to war-torn Gaza.The baby, who was born after a strike in southern Gaza that also killed her father and sister, suffered respiratory problems and doctors were unable to save her, said her uncle, Rami al-Sheikh.“I buried her in her father’s grave,” he said in a phone interview on Friday.The mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, was killed along with her husband, Shukri, and their 3-year-old daughter Malak when…

Tony Probst’s passion for the Titanic is unwavering.Since the mid-1990s, he has amassed hundreds of artifacts from the ship’s maiden voyage in 1912, including a lifeboat plaque, china, sheet music and an array of personal documents.“I believe I’m the only person on planet Earth who has every piece of paper for one individual to get on board Titanic,” Mr. Probst, 64, said proudly this week.His collection is sometimes on display at the audio and visual store he runs with his sons in the Bay Area of California, but it has also toured prominent spaces, including the National Geographic Museum in…

It never bothered Benjamin Andrew Krauss in the slightest if Shana Gabrielle Mansbach took a call from Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, while they were out to dinner, and then ran off to draft a letter or a speech.“That happened not infrequently,” said Mr. Krauss, 40, who knew the situation all too well. “This is the nature of what we do.”The two Washington speechwriters had never met or heard of each other before connecting on the Hinge dating app in July 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.“He was in his bubble, I was in mine,” said…

Rising prices have made people grumpy. They have depressed consumer confidence, despite a growing economy and low unemployment.But exactly how inflation is hurting, helping and confusing people is hard to understand. Everyone knows that the cost of living has increased. Yet unless you’re constantly pulling out a calculator, you’re unlikely to know whether your wages are keeping up with inflation, whether the stock market has actually hit a real peak or whether a lottery jackpot is as sweet as the marketers claim.There’s a fancy name for the common human failure to see past the gaudy prices largely created by inflation.…

‘The Royal Hotel’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.Kitty Green’s follow-up to the taut drama “The Assistant” is a feminist riff on the ’70s classic “Wake in Fright,” in which two Canadian tourists who have run out of money in Australia take on a gig as bartenders at a grimy watering hole in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a large mining area,” they’re told, so “you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention.” For 90 tightly-wound minutes, Green mixes bleary naturalism and baked-in dread, as these modern women are exposed to the handsy, winking Neanderthal clientele, and the…

Israel’s defense minister has said that the country’s military has eliminated half of Hezbollah’s commanders in southern Lebanon. But analysts doubt whether Israel’s increasing use of targeted killings would weaken the militant group.Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and is Iran’s most powerful regional proxy, has had intense cross-border clashes with Israeli forces ever since the Hamas-led attacks in Israel on Oct. 7. With little sign of the conflict abating and with diplomatic talks yet to result in a cease-fire, Israel has in recent months begun killing Hezbollah fighters in targeted strikes, reflecting an apparent shift in military strategy.“Half of…

Plenty of people still think of Gloria Steinem as the tall, comely babe with honey-toned, center-parted hair who decades ago blazed a trail for second-wave feminism wearing aviator glasses perched on the bridge of her nose.Some of those people may be heartened to learn that, apart from a few steel-gray hairs and creases, Ms. Steinem, who turned 90 in March, looked much the same when she hosted a discussion this month in support of a new marketing campaign for Jones Road, her friend Bobbi Brown’s four-year-old beauty brand.“I was ‘the pretty one,’” Ms. Steinem said of her early days as…